“Every day our bodies separate,


exploded torn and dazed.

Not understanding what we celebrate

we grope through languages and hesitate

and touch each other, speechless and amazed;

and every day our bodies separate

us farther from our planned, deliberate
ironic lives. I am afraid, disphased,

not understanding what we celebrate

when our fused limbs and lips communicate
the unlettered power we have raised.

Every day our bodies’ separate

routines are harder to perpetuate.
In wordless darkness we learn wordless praise,

not understanding what we celebrate;

wake to ourselves, exhausted, in the late

morning as the wind tears off the haze,

not understanding how we celebrate

our bodies. Every day we separate.

”

—	“Villanelle for D.G.B.” - Marilyn Hacker

To New York!

“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”

-David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Day 55:

When you first slice there’s a sting, and soon, when you catch sight of the blood, your heart starts racing and pounding because you’ve gotten away with something you know you shouldn’t be doing. Then you go into a sort of hypnotic state, because you’re in total awe watching that bright red line puddle up on your skin, watching it run down your arm like a waterfall. And then comes the sweet release, although it only lasts for a few moments. That sweet release comes with the second and third cut, before you start to try to hold off as long as you can before you draw the razor again across your skin. It doesn’t even hurt anymore by the fourth; it has merely become a chance to finally let go. Or maybe it does hurt a little, but you don’t notice the pain because it hurts way less than everything else, and besides, it’s the only thing you can manage to do right.

Oh literature...

“It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap dug during which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the word ‘castle’, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away in the green shade…”

—	Ian McEwan, Atonement, Page 35

Everything whimsical has left.

I live at the end of a 5 and 1/2 minute hallway
But as far as I can see you are still miles from me
In your doorway

And oh by the way
When the landlord came today
He measured everything
I knew he'd get it wrong
But I just played along
Cause I was hoping that he would fix it all

Inside your door
But there's more to this story
Than I've been letting on
There are words made of letters
Unwritten
And yes I forgive you
For leading me on

You can think of it like this
When you can't resist
I'm in your hallway standing on a cliff
And just when I think I've found the trick
I'm tumbling
Like an echo

'Cause there's only so far I can go
When you're living in a hallway that keeps growing
I think to myself
30 seconds and I'll be there 

Black Widow

“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.”

—	Tennessee Williams

“I thought about all the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it’s in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.”

—	Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close